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Apple’s Jobs: ‘You don’t want your phone to be like a PC’

By LC Angell ● Thursday, January 11, 2007

Apple CEO Steve Jobs says consumers can expect more mobile applications for the iPhone by the time the device ships in June—but that Apple will control what applications make it onto the iPhone, much like it has done with every iPod.

“We define everything that is on the phone,” Jobs told the New York Times. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.” Jobs told Newsweek something similar. “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” he said. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” Jobs continued. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

During the unveiling of the iPhone, which runs a scaled down version of Mac OS X, Jobs showed off applications for email, web browsing, photos, SMS text messaging, and Google Maps, as well as widgets for weather and stocks. Other icons on the iPhone prototype include Calendar, Camera, Calculator, Notes, Clock, and Settings.